I don’t know what that line is, but I feel like I’ve been straddling it for too long.

I started writing yesterday, about how computer system updates at my mom’s employer resulted in my being unable to send her emails. And with that update, our last line of communication was slammed shut. So my idea was that she still sends emails like normal, but my response would be posted on a blog that she checks via her work computer. But today at work she tried to access WordPress at work and she said it took her to a page that said it cost $2.99 a month, so I don’t know I think she didn’t go to WordPress.com Trying to counsel my mother via text on how to look up a blog online is inhumanely frustrating. Because if this doesn’t work…what else is there?
No, I can’t call her. Her phone usage at home is heavily monitored. One of my dad’s favorite tricks was waking up from a nap but lurking behind his closed bedroom door to eavesdrop on a phone conversation happening nearby while the speaker assumed they were still within the afternoon nap reprieve. Or he’d be in the den watching TV and upon noticing I was in my bedroom on the phone he’d mute the TV to better listen in. And yes, I could call her at work, but am I really making her have a hyper emotional conversation on the switchboard with a coworker sitting right next to her? I could send letters to her at work. I guess that’s the one option left to me if she can’t figure out accessing this site. To me it’s not hard, but I guess we all understand things differently.

It just tears at me, the guilt and pain I feel over this situation with my mom.

There are those who tragically lose their mothers all too young. And there are those who do not want a thing to do with their mother for valid and real reasons (I feel that way about my dad, so). But think how hard it would be to just be losing all of this time, time that you won’t ever get back, that you want to have. I spend all this time I don’t want to with my in-laws, and frankly I know that wouldn’t bother me if I ever got to see my own mother.

It’s not even for me.

The despair I feel about this situation, it stems from the long-established notion that my mom needs me. She always has. I probably seemed like a really shitty little brat to a lot of the adults in my life, but I acted like a grown up because that’s how I was treated. I was all she had, that and her mom, but her mom was the source of some strife, to be sure. Not to say I don’t love my Grandma, but she was kind of really emotionally manipulative. And she taught me to hold shit over people’s heads, and to bring up terrible things they’d done years before, and to never forget a slight. I guess today they just call that pettiness, but yeah, it was a thing in 1920s Wisconsin as well. But, I’ve told you how hard she must have had it growing up, so it kind of makes sense she was like that. She couldn’t forget the times when she had nothing and felt like nothing. And in a lot of ways, she was your typical stereotypical grandmother, in a good way. And in even more ways, I had a better/closer relationship with my Grandma than anyone I knew. Like I said, you don’t appreciate it when you’re young, but you certainly will when they’re gone and you’re grown and you realize you miss being with those you always took for granted. Teenage Cassie never would have realized how I would feel now as I near the end of my twenties. I have less than 9 months until I’m 30. I’m very unexcited. I mean I will be glad to live longer, don’t get me wrong…but like…okay being in your 30s means you shouldn’t literally always just be scraping by. Which is all we’ve been able to accomplish. And we’re poor cliches, we spend a ton on credit because we want nice shit just like everyone else. Plus because my Grandma was so into buying me stuff, I genuinely associated presents with real affection as a child. I know that makes me sound insane and materialistic, and insanely materialistic, but I also don’t care I’ve come to find out it’s the truth.
The point of all of this is figuring myself out. Because there’s this disconnect between my negative emotions and their root causes. Or at least that used to be the case. And I guess identification is half the battle or something.

So, as you can see, I have/had kind of weird and complicated emotional relationships with my mom and her mom. I was also very close with my mom and Grandma for most of my childhood and adolescence. Things tapered off a bit when I started working. But frankly I feel like that was insisted upon, by my parents. Both my brother and I obtained employment and driver’s licenses at 16, many of my friends did neither at that age.

So now, I’m faced with the notion that I have no way to regularly communicate with my mom. And there’s no knowing when we’ll see each other again. She can’t sneak away. My father is incredibly unemployed, besides the napping he is always in their house, in the den, chewing tobacco and rocking in a Laz-E-Boy and watching Fox News or televangelists or some shit. Sure, a lot of the times he is super fucked up while he’s watching TV, but when you have the kind of tolerance he has, it just kind of either makes him way more aggressive or way more annoying. It depends on what he’s on, what he’s out of, etc, etc. So I can’t call or text her phone, for fear he’ll intercept it. Same goes for the mail.

And before you ask, I know he can’t do anything to me anymore, he doesn’t even know where I live. None of my family members have ever been to the house I’ve lived in for over two years. But he can make my mom’s life a living hell. And yes, he does that mostly all the time on his own as well, but it’s like throwing a tired politician another decades-old scandal about their opponent or something. I’ve discussed before how he uses sermon-like lectures to wear his opponents (read = his wife and children) down. He was also a huge fan of public embarrassment/humiliation as a means of control. And I don’t know where it came from originally, but my mom has a near psychotic level of fear that the people she sees in regular life (her coworkers) might know about how miserable her life really is. She has always taken privacy to a pathological extreme….and if it were some reason other than the feeling that she had to do so because my dad was doing SUCH fucked up shit…I might let it go. But that’s the fucking reason. And that’s just what I remember. Who the fuck knows what my brother remembers, he’s three years older. I’m not asking him, I don’t want to know. It probably makes me a bad person, not wanting to take on another’s psychic pain…but I got too much of that too young x 1000, I will NOT tolerate it now.

I don’t know where we’ll go from here.

And boy, isn’t that the defining characteristic of my life right now. My job is my one constant, and it’s really not that great. I mean I like it, but boy are my standards low…considering how bad I had it before. And then I’m like wait what if that’s exactly how I chose my husband…..

Because really, I still am not over things. We haven’t had a “bad” evening in a few weeks now.

But we did something that we’ve done before…and I found it fascinating.

Well, one of the first things we did together that I was happy or at all positive about after the horrible, spoiled wedding night at the luxury venue with the the top floor bridal suite and the wedding night lingerie he never even noticed I was wearing he was already so mad at me for getting upset he’d invited a dozen people back to the room when the reception ended, was buying furniture. We had the wedding money, and I’d wanted a new couch and a coffee table and a TV and a TV stand that was shit for quite some time. So we bought all of that. It was the first thing I was excited about after the ruined wedding night and transitively the ruined memories that were supposed to be among my best. Just like my whole childhood. Except even my dumb, shit family had the fucking courtesy to be cool on my wedding day, at least to me, Lord knows they must have squabbled a few times among themselves because that’s what they do.

And, to be truthful….the week before we got engaged, we purchased a bed. Before, we’d been living together for four years utilizing both of our full beds from before we met. We pushed them together to form “superbed” but it kind of sucked nonetheless, because it was sleeping in separate beds, one full is not enough for us. But something urged us to check out a mattress store that’d opened in front of my work. Then we were buying a bed. Then a week later my husband proposed.

And now…as we are at our third major furniture expenditure…..I can’t say I’m at all shocked.

Isn’t it sad that something like buying furniture is enough to make use both happy? To mend something emotional between us? I doubt this is how healthy people are.

We got a kitchen table, it was a hand me down from our in laws. It prompted the desire to purchase chairs for it. Then, since we were already in the furniture store, using the store charge, I mentioned my deep desire for a bedframe and headboard for the bed we bought a week before our 2013 engagement. So that happened. It even came with a settee AND I can finally use the bedskirt that came with our comforter that I knew I kept for a reason.

It’s pathetic to admit that having new and different objects in your domicile are enough to improve your happiness. But then it’s like…are people who don’t take joy in things just jealous they need stupid other people? But then they’ll just argue that the joy you get off of things is fleeting. But…have you met other people? As if they or any of what they offer is permanent. I mean people like vow it in front of their respective gods and their families all the time, then they break up anyway. But not all, so do what makes you happy.

But I guess not if you’re like me, and material things make you happy. Not because you don’t also want immaterial things…but because you’re like bright enough to not really expect those. They didn’t happen when you were a kid and things were supposed to be easy. They were the opposite of easy.

That’s how they still are.

I still don’t know what to do.

About my mom.

About my husband who claims it was his “addict” behavior that drove him to fuck a stranger he met on CRAIGS LIST. He’s been going to AA very regularly since I accidentally found out, by noticing how pale he’d gotten over an innocuous enough question. You can’t lie to someone like me, not if I’ve known you a long time.

I mean, if I were to speak plainly (which I don’t do in real life), I just want to be able to see my mom on occasion, and to have a husband who I won’t always secretly doubt a little bit now.

So you see, since both are impossible, what am I to do? One thing tears at me. One thing drags me down. And yet I am surrounded by those who wonder at my inability to walk upright. If they notice me at all. But I do my best to avoid them. I do my best to avoid everything. I’m good at hunkering down, waiting out the storm, just hoping my POS dad dies before my mom…but if he doesn’t….I might never see my mom alive again.

Just some of the MANY thoughts that plagued me today. And today I was distracted by the imminent arrival of the new furniture.